Best pistol caliber vs body armor, NO Colorado posts!

[Mello2u]

It is my understanding that there are two factors which primarily account for handgun bullets penetrating soft body armor; velocity and bullet configuration.

The higher the velocity the more likely the bullet will shear the fibers which make up the soft body armor.

By bullet configuration I encompass two factors: one, the three dimensional shape, (pointy is better at putting a cutting point into the fibers which allow the rest of the bullet to follow); and two, hardness of the bullet material. A pure copper bullet with a conical point driven at 1500 fps (regardless of caliber) is likely to defeat a Class IIIA vest.

 

[scrubcedar]

I'm fairly sure the of the answer to this, but I'll ask anyway. Are steel core, or AP bullets as components available? If they are is it illegal to manufacture rounds from them? Alternately would it be feasible to design a mold for a 7.62 mm bullet intended to be used in the pistol round that was pointed and cast it in hard lead or copper? I am completely ignorant of everything having to do with hand loading so these ideas may be in left field. 800 rounds from trained LE, most of them aimed at the head, all were ineffective, scary. I would assume that they would be better than I am in a shoot out. Maybe practicing praying under pressure as well as marksmanship would be a good idea.

 

[Sport45]

The thing is, do you really want to load your carry weapon with something that's effective against body armor but no better than FMJ against better than 99% of the threats you are likely to encounter?

I continue to carry LSWCHP or JHP with no additional worries.

 

[scrubcedar]

After all this I'm probably going to end up carrying a tokarev. I would see the specialty rounds as something carried in a third extra magazine, my last ditch ammo, probabably kept in a different spot so it's not confused with the others. Normal SD rounds in the other magazines.

 

[Dragline45]

It's not terribly uncommon to find pistols that are capable of head shot accuracy out to 50 yards and beyond. However, the accuracy of a pistol, is very rarely the long pole in the tent, so to speak. That's true even at the range, when conditions are ideal.

I can consistently hit my 5 inch steel plate at 50 yards with my 22/45, probably due to the countless bricks I have put through the gun. Although with my SR9C I only hit it maybe 1/3 of the time. If only my 22/45 was a viable choice for a SD gun.

 

[stevelyn]

After all this I'm probably going to end up carrying a tokarev. I would see the specialty rounds as something carried in a third extra magazine, my last ditch ammo, probabably kept in a different spot so it's not confused with the others. Normal SD rounds in the other magazines.

There really isn't a need to do that. The chances of you encountering an armored assailant are pretty slim. Even if you do, you can identify it early on and make adjustments in your response as needed.

 

[Stukaman]

I'll just chime in about the question of breaking ribs. there's a video or two out there of a guy in body armor voluntarily being shot by a high powered rifle at a distance of a few feet. He stands on one foot as he's shot and doesn't even lose his balance.

Maybe it'd be different with a big .44 slug, but I doubt you could count on breaking bones or knocking him off his feet. If it doesn't penetrate, it may leave a bruise, but I wouldn't expect much more than that.

A rifle cartridge is still more powerful than a .44 mag. A rifle is a rifle and a pistol is a pistol regardless of whether you chamber the .44mag in a rifle it's still a pistol cartridge. 30-30 is more powerful than a .44mag in a rifle.

 

[Falcon642]

Couple of points that have to be made.

1. Just because the round goes through the vest don't expect the bad guy to go down.

A Tokarev will penetrate a Level II vest, but after it has gone through the vest it will only penetrate 4.6 inches of ballistic gel. If your shot penetrates the vest, and then hits the sternum or a rib you are not going to do much damage.

http://www.brassfetcher.com/index_files/Page1242.htm

2. You are FAR more likely to encounter an unarmored bad guy than a bad guy wearing armor. Against an unarmored bad guy, FMJ rounds from a Tokarev or a .357 Sig will be far less effective than JHP rounds from a 9mm, .40, .45 or any other major pistol caliber.

Is it really worth carrying ammo that is less effective against 99% of bad guys on the off chance you might run into the 1% of bad guys who are wearing armor?

 

[Aguila Blanca]

Straight from my instructor's manual as taught by the Alaska DPS Academy where 80% of police officers statewide and all the Troopers are trained:

"Fail-To-Stop Drill- (Plan B) After hitting the assailant with a pair to the upper chest, minimum standard response to lethal threat(italics mine) you should quickly evaluate whether the shots were effective. If they were not effective, you should change plans and determine if a head shot is available. If the head is still there and you have a high probability of hitting it, you should deliver one shot to the head. Remember, the head is a difficult target to hit due to its small size and ability to turn rapidly."

So.........Two shots, assess......one to the head if the action hasn't stopped. I think in reality everyone will repeat as necessary.

It goes on to say in the next paragragh it should stop the fight if accurate, but a miss is a danger to bystanders (duh) and should not be attempted beyond 5 yards unless you are confident of making a hit.

However, in my experience due to the nature of qualifications being timed they deliver all three shots as fast as they can. The qual doesn't have an assess feature built into it. In training though I do teach 2 shots, assess, head

I encounter faux Mozambiques in competition, too, and obviously when less time is the name of the game there is no "assess" feature built into it.

This statement from your instructor's manual struck me as humorous, although I know it wasn't meant that way:

"Fail-To-Stop Drill- (Plan B) After hitting the assailant with a pair to the upper chest, minimum standard response to lethal threat(italics mine) you should quickly evaluate whether the shots were effective. If they were not effective, you should change plans and determine if a head shot is available. If the head is still there and you have a high probability of hitting it, you should deliver one shot to the head. Remember, the head is a difficult target to hit due to its small size and ability to turn rapidly."

"If the head is still there"? Where would it have gone?

 

[Nanuk]

So has anyone seen or heard of effective training other than the Mozambique drill we already talked about? You would think it was looked into by LE after the California shooting.

That was a watershed moment in LE, the Patrol Carbine has almost totally replaced the shotgun in Police cars, although slugs would have done a number.

 

[Double Naught Spy]

2. You are FAR more likely to encounter an unarmored bad guy than a bad guy wearing armor. Against an unarmored bad guy, FMJ rounds from a Tokarev or a .357 Sig will be far less effective than JHP rounds from a 9mm, .40, .45 or any other major pistol caliber.

Is it really worth carrying ammo that is less effective against 99% of bad guys on the off chance you might run into the 1% of bad guys who are wearing armor?

When I started carrying, it was 0.1% Odds have increased by 10 times, but depending on the year, the odds of actually encountering a bad guy may have gone down in general. What are the odds I will run into an armed bad guy at all today?

So if you are playing the odds game, it makes it hard to carry a gun in general. I haven't needed to defend myself with a firearm in 30 years, LOL, and certainly haven't in the last 13 of carrying regularly.

You see, your premise statement is just plain wrong. FMJ from the TOK or .357 Sig will be as effective as JHP from the calibers that you mentioned. In fact, .22 lr will. No, check that, a completely unloaded gun well. It would iseem that over 90% of Kleck's defensive gun uses each day are with guns never fired 6800, not that we even know that they are even necessarily legal acts of brandishing and such. So day in and day out, we aren't likely to need a gun and day in and day out, should we happen to need one one the very rare occasion than there is a 90% chance or more that we won't even bother with discharging it. Never mind then getting into the number of rounds that actually hit the bad guys, but we know it is far from 100%.

So you think folks need to pick ammo based on the type of situation where they will be shooting and hitting bad guys. I have to agree with you. That is a valid way to assess what you should be shooting. If you have to shoot somebody and the bullets will be hitting that person, you want them to be the most effective possible. That is what you are saying and I agree 100%. I just can't fathom how I can make a decision very will on something happening in such an incredibly small percentage of my life. We aren't even talking about a whole day in my life because when I am at home, I have a rifle and so that actually then reduces the chances of needing my handgun by at leat half to 2/3 again as I have rifle access that amount of the time.

"If the head is still there"? Where would it have gone?

I think this is again one of those percentage things where they manual is trying to cover things by the percentages. Apparently based on credible reports from officers shooting with bad guys, there is a high enough percentage of the time where they have reported being in such gun fights where the bad guy's head ceases to be present in the conflict whereby the body is still engaging the officers. As such, no improper instruction wants to be give to officers apt to find themselves in such a situation. They do not want officers shooting a location where the head was and should have been, but is a location where the head remains no longer. The wording was obviously poor. To handle such situations where the head is gone but the body remains firing at the officer, the officer should be instructed to simply engage the threat that is visible or of a known location. Engaging threats or portions of threats of unknown locations is not advised.

 

[scrubcedar]

Dragline,Stevelyn, they do have JHP rounds for 7.62x25. If you guys have heard these are ineffective in some way let me know, my minds not set in stone.
From what I've seen of the tokarev it is a (relatively) thin pistol that shouldn't be that hard or uncomfortable to conceal. It has 8+1 capacity and a round with some interesting qualities.
It's simple, so it should be easy to learn. I've heard repeated raves about it's accuracy, and I can practice with cheap surplus ammo. It seems like a step up from my j-frame in pretty much every way. The fact that I might be able to craft rounds effective against body armor if we see a bunch of copy cats from this guy is a bonus.

 

[stevelyn]

Scrubcedar

I personally have no experience shooting the Tokarev pistol or the round. So I'm not sure what is available for bullets. In my formative years while marching in the legions, they were commie guns and looked down upon as being the unrefined arms of our enemies.

Because they were commie guns for so long, there hasn't been enough use of them to really establish any kind of track record for their use in the US as defensive pistols.

When we became friends with the Russkies, I never got the opportunity to snatch one up and start playing with it. I am interested in obtaining a CZ version of it one of these days, but it's not on my priority list.

You might want to take a look at the .327 Federal though. Looking at the numbers on it, it would appear that it has the same potential that you are looking for or better and one those is on my prioity list.

 

[scrubcedar]

Thanks stevelyn, I'll look into it.

 

[zxcvbob]

Re: 7.62x25

The cheap surplus ammo is not cheap anymore. It doubled in price last year, although it's come back down a little. The reason the round works so well against soft armor is the bullets are small diameter and steel-jacketed.

I'd like to pull some of the bullets and load them in .30 Carbine, which is a much hotter round, just to see what they'd do from a Blackhawk or Automag III.

Now I need to go check some cheap steel-cased Commie .30 Carbine ammo and see if any has magnetic bullets... If so, that's the way to go.

 

[Nanuk]

Just carry a Snubby 44 magnum loaded with 2400. If you don't hit them you will catch them on fire.

 

[Falcon642]

You might want to take a look at the .327 Federal though. Looking at the numbers on it, it would appear that it has the same potential that you are looking for or better and one those is on my prioity list.

Ever seen a FMJ .327 round? Hell, have you ever seen ANY revolver caliber with FMJ bullets?

You are right that the .327 is very similar to the 7.62X25 in terms of bullet diameter and velocity, but if you have to use semi-wadcutters in your .327 you aren't going to penetrate the vest.

 

[scrubcedar]

Zxcv, do you know of a source for the steel jacketed ammo?

 

[zxcvbob]

Here's one place, there are others that may be cheaper:
http://www.jgsales.com/7.62x25-polish-fmj-70rd-box-p-3144.html

The stuff I bought was Bulgarian. It shoots good, but the brass splits at the necks (wasn't annealed, and it's 50 years old) so it's not really reloadable even if you can deal with the Berdan primers.

 

[ofitg]

I'm fairly sure the of the answer to this, but I'll ask anyway. Are steel core, or AP bullets as components available? If they are is it illegal to manufacture rounds from them? Alternately would it be feasible to design a mold for a 7.62 mm bullet intended to be used in the pistol round that was pointed and cast it in hard lead or copper?

Scrubcedar, here is the legal definition of "armor piercing bullets", outlawed in 1986 -

http://uscode.house.gov/download/pls/18C44.txt

(B) The term "armor piercing ammunition" means -
(i) a projectile or projectile core which may be used in a
handgun and which is constructed entirely (excluding the presence
of traces of other substances) from one or a combination of
tungsten alloys, steel, iron, brass, bronze, beryllium copper, or
depleted uranium; or
(ii) a full jacketed projectile larger than .22 caliber
designed and intended for use in a handgun and whose jacket has a
weight of more than 25 percent of the total weight of the
projectile.

----------------------------------------------------

For what you want to do, I would suggest casting trunctated cone bullets from zinc - zinc is not on the list of prohibited materials, zinc's melting temperature is within the range of commercial equipment like LEE Production Pots, and zinc hardness approaches that of brass or sintered iron.

Be advised, zinc's specific gravity is about 2/3 the density of lead - a mold designed for 120 gr. lead bullets will drop zinc bullets weighing ~ 80 gr.